OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Corrections of Zipf's and Heaps' Laws Derived from Hapax Rate Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The article introduces corrections to Zipf's and Heaps' laws based on systematic models of the proportion of hapaxes, i.e., words that occur once. The derivation rests on two assumptions: The first one is the standard urn model which predicts that marginal frequency distributions for shorter texts look as if word tokens were sampled blindly from a given longer text. The second assumption posits that the hapax rate is a simple function of the text length. Four such functions are discussed: the constant model, the Davis model, the linear model, and the logistic model. It is shown that the logistic model yields the best fit.
RLCD: Reinforcement Learning from Contrastive Distillation for Language Model Alignment
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

We propose Reinforcement Learning from Contrastive Distillation (RLCD), a method for aligning language models to follow principles expressed in natural language (e.g., to be more harmless) without using human feedback. RLCD creates preference pairs from two contrasting model outputs, one using a positive prompt designed to encourage following the given principles, and one using a negative prompt designed to encourage violating them. Using two different prompts causes model outputs to be more differentiated on average, resulting in cleaner preference labels in the absence of human annotations. We then use the preference pairs to train a preference model, which is in turn used to improve a base unaligned language model via reinforcement learning. Empirically, RLCD outperforms RLAIF (Bai et al., 2022b) and context distillation (Huang et al., 2022) baselines across three diverse alignment tasks--harmlessness, helpfulness, and story outline generation--and when using both 7B and 30B model scales for simulating preference data.
Unsupervised extraction of local and global keywords from a single text
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

We propose an unsupervised, corpus-independent method to extract keywords from a single text. It is based on the spatial distribution of words and the response of this distribution to a random permutation of words. As compared to existing methods (such as e.g. YAKE) our method has three advantages. First, it is significantly more effective at extracting keywords from long texts. Second, it allows inference of two types of keywords: local and global. Third, it uncovers basic themes in texts. Additionally, our method is language-independent and applies to short texts. The results are obtained via human annotators with previous knowledge of texts from our database of classical literary works (the agreement between annotators is from moderate to substantial). Our results are supported via human-independent arguments based on the average length of extracted content words and on the average number of nouns in extracted words. We discuss relations of keywords with higher-order textual features and reveal a connection between keywords and chapter divisions.
Rewriting and Completeness of Sum-Over-Paths in Dyadic Fragments of Quantum Computing
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2024
Year: 2024

The "Sum-Over-Paths" formalism is a way to symbolically manipulate linear maps that describe quantum systems, and is a tool that is used in formal verification of such systems. We give here a new set of rewrite rules for the formalism, and show that it is complete for "Toffoli-Hadamard", the simplest approximately universal fragment of quantum mechanics. We show that the rewriting is terminating, but not confluent (which is expected from the universality of the fragment). We do so using the connection between Sum-over-Paths and graphical language ZH-calculus, and also show how the axiomatisation translates into the latter. We provide generalisations of the presented rewrite rules, that can prove useful when trying to reduce terms in practice, and we show how to graphically make sense of these new rules. We show how to enrich the rewrite system to reach completeness for the dyadic fragments of quantum computation, used in particular in the Quantum Fourier Transform, and obtained by adding phase gates with dyadic multiples of $π$ to the Toffoli-Hadamard gate-set. Finally, we show how to perform sums and concatenation of arbitrary terms, something which is not native in a system designed for analysing gate-based quantum computation, but necessary when considering Hamiltonian-based quantum computation.
When Multi-Task Learning Meets Partial Supervision: A Computer Vision Review
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Multi-Task Learning (MTL) aims to learn multiple tasks simultaneously while exploiting their mutual relationships. By using shared resources to simultaneously calculate multiple outputs, this learning paradigm has the potential to have lower memory requirements and inference times compared to the traditional approach of using separate methods for each task. Previous work in MTL has mainly focused on fully-supervised methods, as task relationships can not only be leveraged to lower the level of data-dependency of those methods but they can also improve performance. However, MTL introduces a set of challenges due to a complex optimisation scheme and a higher labeling requirement. This review focuses on how MTL could be utilised under different partial supervision settings to address these challenges. First, this review analyses how MTL traditionally uses different parameter sharing techniques to transfer knowledge in between tasks. Second, it presents the different challenges arising from such a multi-objective optimisation scheme. Third, it introduces how task groupings can be achieved by analysing task relationships. Fourth, it focuses on how partially supervised methods applied to MTL can tackle the aforementioned challenges. Lastly, this review presents the available datasets, tools and benchmarking results of such methods.
Controlling the Inductive Bias of Wide Neural Networks by Modifying the Kernel's Spectrum
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Wide neural networks are biased towards learning certain functions, influencing both the rate of convergence of gradient descent (GD) and the functions that are reachable with GD in finite training time. As such, there is a great need for methods that can modify this bias according to the task at hand. To that end, we introduce Modified Spectrum Kernels (MSKs), a novel family of constructed kernels that can be used to approximate kernels with desired eigenvalues for which no closed form is known. We leverage the duality between wide neural networks and Neural Tangent Kernels and propose a preconditioned gradient descent method, which alters the trajectory of GD. As a result, this allows for a polynomial and, in some cases, exponential training speedup without changing the final solution. Our method is both computationally efficient and simple to implement.
FakeTracer: Catching Face-swap DeepFakes via Implanting Traces in Training
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Face-swap DeepFake is an emerging AI-based face forgery technique that can replace the original face in a video with a generated face of the target identity while retaining consistent facial attributes such as expression and orientation. Due to the high privacy of faces, the misuse of this technique can raise severe social concerns, drawing tremendous attention to defend against DeepFakes recently. In this paper, we describe a new proactive defense method called FakeTracer to expose face-swap DeepFakes via implanting traces in training. Compared to general face-synthesis DeepFake, the face-swap DeepFake is more complex as it involves identity change, is subjected to the encoding-decoding process, and is trained unsupervised, increasing the difficulty of implanting traces into the training phase. To effectively defend against face-swap DeepFake, we design two types of traces, sustainable trace (STrace) and erasable trace (ETrace), to be added to training faces. During the training, these manipulated faces affect the learning of the face-swap DeepFake model, enabling it to generate faces that only contain sustainable traces. In light of these two traces, our method can effectively expose DeepFakes by identifying them. Extensive experiments corroborate the efficacy of our method on defending against face-swap DeepFake.
EFLNet: Enhancing Feature Learning for Infrared Small Target Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Single-frame infrared small target detection is considered to be a challenging task, due to the extreme imbalance between target and background, bounding box regression is extremely sensitive to infrared small target, and target information is easy to lose in the high-level semantic layer. In this article, we propose an enhancing feature learning network (EFLNet) to address these problems. First, we notice that there is an extremely imbalance between the target and the background in the infrared image, which makes the model pay more attention to the background features rather than target features. To address this problem, we propose a new adaptive threshold focal loss (ATFL) function that decouples the target and the background, and utilizes the adaptive mechanism to adjust the loss weight to force the model to allocate more attention to target features. Second, we introduce the normalized Gaussian Wasserstein distance (NWD) to alleviate the difficulty of convergence caused by the extreme sensitivity of the bounding box regression to infrared small target. Finally, we incorporate a dynamic head mechanism into the network to enable adaptive learning of the relative importance of each semantic layer. Experimental results demonstrate our method can achieve better performance in the detection performance of infrared small target compared to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) deep-learning-based methods. The source codes and bounding box annotated datasets are available at https://github.com/YangBo0411/infrared-small-target.
Exploring Annotation-free Image Captioning with Retrieval-augmented Pseudo Sentence Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Recently, training an image captioner without annotated image-sentence pairs has gained traction. Previous methods have faced limitations due to either using mismatched corpora for inaccurate pseudo annotations or relying on resource-intensive pre-training. To alleviate these challenges, we propose a new strategy where the prior knowledge from large pre-trained models (LPMs) is distilled and leveraged as supervision, and a retrieval process is integrated to further reinforce its effectiveness. Specifically, we introduce Retrieval-augmented Pseudo Sentence Generation (RaPSG), which can efficiently retrieve highly relevant short region descriptions from the mismatching corpora and use them to generate a variety of high-quality pseudo sentences via LPMs. Additionally, we introduce a fluency filter and a CLIP guidance objective to enhance contrastive information learning. Experimental results indicate that our method outperforms SOTA captioning models across various settings including zero-shot, unsupervised, semi-supervised, and cross-domain scenarios. Code is available at: https://github.com/Zhiyuan-Li-John/RaPSG.
A Sampling Lovász Local Lemma for Large Domain Sizes
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

We present polynomial-time algorithms for approximate counting and sampling solutions to constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) with atomic constraints within the local lemma regime: $$ pD^{2+o_q(1)}\lesssim 1. $$ When the domain size $q$ of each variable becomes sufficiently large, this almost matches the known lower bound $pD^2\gtrsim 1$ for approximate counting and sampling solutions to atomic CSPs [Bezáková et al, SICOMP '19; Galanis, Guo, Wang, TOCT '22], thus establishing an almost tight sampling Lovász local lemma for large domain sizes.
A/B Testing and Best-arm Identification for Linear Bandits with Robustness to Non-stationarity
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We investigate the fixed-budget best-arm identification (BAI) problem for linear bandits in a potentially non-stationary environment. Given a finite arm set $\mathcal{X}\subset\mathbb{R}^d$, a fixed budget $T$, and an unpredictable sequence of parameters $\left\lbraceθ_t\right\rbrace_{t=1}^{T}$, an algorithm will aim to correctly identify the best arm $x^* := \arg\max_{x\in\mathcal{X}}x^\top\sum_{t=1}^{T}θ_t$ with probability as high as possible. Prior work has addressed the stationary setting where $θ_t = θ_1$ for all $t$ and demonstrated that the error probability decreases as $\exp(-T /ρ^*)$ for a problem-dependent constant $ρ^*$. But in many real-world $A/B/n$ multivariate testing scenarios that motivate our work, the environment is non-stationary and an algorithm expecting a stationary setting can easily fail. For robust identification, it is well-known that if arms are chosen randomly and non-adaptively from a G-optimal design over $\mathcal{X}$ at each time then the error probability decreases as $\exp(-TΔ^2_{(1)}/d)$, where $Δ_{(1)} = \min_{x \neq x^*} (x^* - x)^\top \frac{1}{T}\sum_{t=1}^T θ_t$. As there exist environments where $Δ_{(1)}^2/ d \ll 1/ ρ^*$, we are motivated to propose a novel algorithm $\mathsf{P1}$-$\mathsf{RAGE}$ that aims to obtain the best of both worlds: robustness to non-stationarity and fast rates of identification in benign settings. We characterize the error probability of $\mathsf{P1}$-$\mathsf{RAGE}$ and demonstrate empirically that the algorithm indeed never performs worse than G-optimal design but compares favorably to the best algorithms in the stationary setting.
Suspended accounts align with the Internet Research Agency misinformation campaign to influence the 2016 US election
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2024
Year: 2024

The ongoing debate surrounding the impact of the Internet Research Agency s (IRA) social media campaign during the 2016 U.S. presidential election has largely overshadowed the involvement of other actors. Our analysis brings to light a substantial group of suspended Twitter users, outnumbering the IRA user group by a factor of 60, who align with the ideologies of the IRA campaign. Our study demonstrates that this group of suspended Twitter accounts significantly influenced individuals categorized as undecided or weak supporters, potentially with the aim of swaying their opinions, as indicated by Granger causality.
CFN-ESA: A Cross-Modal Fusion Network with Emotion-Shift Awareness for Dialogue Emotion Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Multimodal emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) has garnered growing attention from research communities in various fields. In this paper, we propose a Cross-modal Fusion Network with Emotion-Shift Awareness (CFN-ESA) for ERC. Extant approaches employ each modality equally without distinguishing the amount of emotional information in these modalities, rendering it hard to adequately extract complementary information from multimodal data. To cope with this problem, in CFN-ESA, we treat textual modality as the primary source of emotional information, while visual and acoustic modalities are taken as the secondary sources. Besides, most multimodal ERC models ignore emotion-shift information and overfocus on contextual information, leading to the failure of emotion recognition under emotion-shift scenario. We elaborate an emotion-shift module to address this challenge. CFN-ESA mainly consists of unimodal encoder (RUME), cross-modal encoder (ACME), and emotion-shift module (LESM). RUME is applied to extract conversation-level contextual emotional cues while pulling together data distributions between modalities; ACME is utilized to perform multimodal interaction centered on textual modality; LESM is used to model emotion shift and capture emotion-shift information, thereby guiding the learning of the main task. Experimental results demonstrate that CFN-ESA can effectively promote performance for ERC and remarkably outperform state-of-the-art models.
Cooperative Cellular Localization with Intelligent Reflecting Surface: Design, Analysis and Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Autonomous driving and intelligent transportation applications have dramatically increased the demand for high-accuracy and low-latency localization services. While cellular networks are potentially capable of target detection and localization, achieving accurate and reliable positioning faces critical challenges. Particularly, the relatively small radar cross sections (RCS) of moving targets and the high complexity for measurement association give rise to weak echo signals and discrepancies in the measurements. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel approach for multi-target localization by leveraging the controllable signal reflection capabilities of intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs). Specifically, IRSs are strategically mounted on the targets (e.g., vehicles and robots), enabling effective association of multiple measurements and facilitating the localization process. We aim to minimize the maximum Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) of targets by jointly optimizing the target association, the IRS phase shifts, and the dwell time. However, solving this CRLB optimization problem is non-trivial due to the non-convex objective function and closely coupled variables. For single-target localization, a simplified closed-form expression is presented for the case where base stations (BSs) can be deployed flexibly, and the optimal BS location is derived to provide a lower performance bound of the original problem ...
Autonomous Payload Thermal Control
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In small satellites there is less room for heat control equipment, scientific instruments, and electronic components. Furthermore, the near proximity of electronic components makes power dissipation difficult, with the risk of not being able to control the temperature appropriately, reducing component lifetime and mission performance. To address this challenge, taking advantage of the advent of increasing intelligence on board satellites, an autonomous thermal control tool that uses deep reinforcement learning is proposed for learning the thermal control policy onboard. The tool was evaluated in a real space edge processing computer that will be used in a demonstration payload hosted in the International Space Station (ISS). The experiment results show that the proposed framework is able to learn to control the payload processing power to maintain the temperature under operational ranges, complementing traditional thermal control systems.
Provably Secure Commitment-based Protocols over Unauthenticated Channels
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

In this work we construct an alternative Unauthenticated Model, intended to build a theoretic security framework to cover communications protocols whose characteristics may not always concur with the specifics of already existing models for authenticated exchanges. This model is constructed from the notion of commitment schemes, employing ephemeral information, therefore avoiding the exchange of long-term cryptographic material. From this model, we propose a number of Commitment-based protocols to establish a shared secret between two parties, and study their resistance over unauthenticated channels. This means analyzing the security of the protocol itself, and its robustness against Man-in-the-Middle attacks, by formalizing their security under this model. The key-exchange protocols are constructed from KEX and KEM primitives, to show that this model can be applied to both established and new paradigms. We highlight the differences that arise naturally, due to the nature of KEM constructions, in terms of the protocol itself and the types of attacks that they are subject to. We provide practical go-to protocols instances to migrate to, both for KEM-based and KEX-based cryptographic primitives.
Exploring Format Consistency for Instruction Tuning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Instruction tuning has emerged as a promising approach to enhancing large language models in following human instructions. It is shown that increasing the diversity and number of instructions in the training data can consistently enhance generalization performance, which facilitates a recent endeavor to collect various instructions and integrate existing instruction tuning datasets into larger collections. However, different users have their unique ways of expressing instructions, and there often exist variations across different datasets in the instruction styles and formats, i.e., format inconsistency. In this work, we propose a framework named Unified Instruction Tuning (UIT), which calls OpenAI APIs for automatic format transfer among different instruction tuning datasets such as PromptSource, FLAN and CrossFit. With the framework, we (1) demonstrate the necessity of maintaining format consistency in instruction tuning; (2) improve the generalization performance on unseen instructions on T5-LM-xl; (3) provide a novel perplexity-based denoising method to reduce the noise of automatic format transfer to make the UIT framework more practical and a smaller offline model based on GPT-J that achieves comparable format transfer capability to OpenAI APIs to reduce costs in practice. Further analysis regarding variations of targeted formats and other effects is intended.
A Dataflow Compiler for Efficient LLM Inference using Custom Microscaling Formats
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

Model quantization represents both parameters (weights) and intermediate values (activations) in a more compact format, thereby directly reducing both computational and memory cost in hardware. The quantization of recent large language models (LLMs) faces challenges to achieve competitive memory density compared to other models such as convolutional neural networks, since values in LLMs require larger dynamic ranges. Current hardware can expedite computation for LLMs using compact numerical formats such as low-bitwidth integers or floating-point numbers. Each has advantages: integer operations simplify circuit design, whereas floating-point calculations can enhance accuracy when a wider dynamic range is required. In this work, we seek an efficient data format that combines the best of both worlds: Microscaling (MX) formats. MX formats are efficient data formats that achieve both large dynamic ranges and high memory density. In this paper, we propose a compiler named MASE for exploring mixed-precision MX formats on dataflow hardware accelerators for LLM inference. Our main contributions are twofold. First, we propose a novel orchestration abstraction to explore both software and hardware optimizations with new data formats. Second, MASE achieves LLM inference at an average precision of 4-bits, with minimal to no accuracy degradation. To our knowledge, MASE represents the first effort to harness fine-grain multi-precision MX formats in the design of LLM hardware accelerators. Over a range of LLMs and datasets, MASE achieves an average improvement of 24% in $Δ$ accuracy with an overhead of only 3% in energy efficiency compared to designs using 8-bit fixed-point numbers.